The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

Edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette

Description

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements and tendencies.

This volume offers the fullest and most nuanced account available of the last eight decades of British prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel and the reader. The collection is made up of thirty-four chapters by leading scholars in the field who detail the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender and different periods of women's writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children's novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

Edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Life and Death of the Post-War Novel, Peter Boxall and Bryan CheyettePart 1: 1940-1973: Key Figures and Contexts 1. The Material History of the Novel I: 1940-1973, Andrew Nash2. Fiction during the Second World War, Lara Feigel3. The Question of Evil: Neo-Christianity and the Novel, Robert Eaglestone4. Working Class Fictions, Nicola Wilson5. The Novel and the End of Empire, John McLeod6. Migrant Writing, C.L. Innes7. Women's Fiction after the War, Liz Sage8. The Movement towards Englishness, Zachary Leader9. The Continuities of Late Modernism: Before and after Beckett, Tyrus Miller10. Comedy, Class and Nation, Philip Tew11. In the Wake of Joyce: Irish Writing after 1939, MichaelCronin12. Judging the Distance: Fiction with Europe in Mind, Rod MenghamPart 2: Genres/Subgenres 13. Cinematic and Televisual Fiction, Laura Marcus14. The Novel as History, John Brannigan15. The Novel Sequence, Nick Bentley16. Novel, Novella, Short Story, Adrian Hunter17. Spies, Detectives and Heroes: From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Martin Priestman18. The Children's Novel, Peter Hunt19. Queers, Chaps, Chicks and Lads, Emma Parker20. Jewish Fictions, Nadia Valman21. The Regional and the Global, Liam Connell22. Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic, Sherryl VintPart 3: 1973-Present: Key Figures and Contexts 23. The Material History of the Novel II 1973-Present, Andrew Nash24. Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11, Paul Crosthwaite25. Decentring Englishness, David James26. The Feminist Novel, Mary Eagleton27. Black British and British Asian Fiction, Peter Morey28. A Plurinational Literature? Nationalism in British and Northern Irish Fiction Since 1970, Matthew Hart29. The New Scottish Renaissance?, Scott Hames30. Ireland and Europe after 1973, Derek Hand31. Welsh Fiction: 1979, 1997 and after, Kirsti BohataPart IV: Approaching the Twenty-first Century Novel 32. Twenty-First Century Fiction, Berthold Schoene33. The Future of the Novel, Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

Edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette

Author Information

Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex,Bryan Cheyette, Chair in Modern Literature, University of Reading

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge, 2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (Continuum, 2009) and Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (CUP, 2013). He has edited a number of collections, including Thinking Poetry and Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, and a recent Faber edition of Beckett's novel Malone Dies. He is also the editor of Textual Practice and 1001 Books. His most recent book, The Value of the Novel, is forthcoming with CUP in 2015. He is currently working on a book entitled The ProstheticImagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life.

Bryan Cheyette is Chair of Modern Literature at the University of Reading. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan, Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Muriel Spark: The Writer and Her Work (2000) and Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2014). He is the editor of six previous books, most notably Between 'Race' and Culture (1996), Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew' (1997), and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland (1998). He is currently working on a biography of Israel Zangwill and he has reviewed contemporary fiction for the TLS, The Independent and the Guardian.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

Edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette

Reviews and Awards

"Viewed on its own terms, the volume is well conceived, and contains a number of excellent essays by leading critics ... There are important attempts to rethink national identity, to rearticulate the relationship between history and the novel and to define the cultural work of the novel now. Critics of the contemporary, in particular, will find much here to ponder." --Dominic Head, The Review of English Studies

"a fascinating compendium of a lot of very lifelike activity from British and Irish novelists over the past seventy years." --Ben Jeffery, Times Literary Supplement